


Restless

by DeCarabas



Category: Tam Lin (Traditional Ballad)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-03 02:39:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2835086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/pseuds/DeCarabas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Tam Lin adjusts to a world without magic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Restless

**Author's Note:**

  * For [angelan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelan/gifts).



He gets restless at night, her Tam Lin. He takes walks, hours and hours on the city streets, and when he slips back into Janet's bed, a chill is still clinging to his skin. Never seems to be able to figure out how to bundle up for a northern winter. He likes fine coats, expensive coats—and where he found the money for them, she doesn't want to know—but it's the looks of them he likes, not the little practicalities like whether the wind will slice right through that pretty cloth. He feels the cold as much as she does, he must—the tip of his nose turns bright red in the cold—it's just that he doesn't seem to mind, like a kid on a snow day. So in the early hours of the morning he crawls back into bed and wraps his arms around her, his warm breath against the nape of her neck, and a chill rising from his skin that settles right into her.

Sometimes she’ll go with him, though she’s not quite the night owl he is, and sometimes they’ll drive rather than walk. She thinks Tam Lin would drive all the time if he could, but the thought of giving him driving lessons is a little too terrifying for her to contemplate just yet. Fairy queens and shapeshifting battles are one thing, but Tam Lin’s enthusiasm for technology is quite another. So she drives slow, lazy circles around the near-empty streets, and when she lets him, he’ll roll down a window to feel the wind, no matter how cold it is. She draws the line at anything below freezing. And sometimes they’ll talk, and sometimes they won’t, and most of the time that’s good too.

And then sometimes he’ll keep up a running stream of chatter at the GPS or at her, and she’s not sure it makes much difference to him which. He says he understands that the GPS isn’t a person, but he also says the GPS reminds him of talking with the birds, and she has no idea how to interpret that.

And then sometimes he cranes his neck to look up at the stars, and she feels like she’s alone in the car, or he is.

She'd tried playing tour guide on their first few drives, when she first won him back from the fairies—tried to show him the sights, the same way she'd tried to show him how to get around on his own. But what she thinks he needs to know and what _he_ thinks he needs to know don’t often match up, so that didn’t last long. She lets him work it out on his own. And sometimes he tinkers until he figures it out, and sometimes he comes to her for an explanation, and sometimes she comes home to find Tam Lin figuring out laundry in the kitchen sink while there’s a puddle of soap suds overflowing from the washing machine.

The first and only time he tried to use the microwave, it exploded. Actually exploded—no flying shrapnel, but there’d been a bang and a sudden burnt brown stain on the side of the plastic, and whatever it was behind the plastic that made microwaves work just no longer worked. Lately Janet has come to realize how little she understands about how _anything_ in her apartment works. So they’d googled it, and Google had been able to explain how microwaves worked to Tam Lin’s satisfaction—but why it had exploded on him remained a mystery.

But microwaves aside—and he’d stubbornly refused to touch the new one for fear of breaking this one too, as if the microwave was the first thing he’d broken around here—microwaves aside, Tam Lin is generally eager to embrace the mortal world and all its challenges. At least while the sun's up. It's just those late nights when the streets are empty, the nights when he’ll slip out of bed and walk for hours, or when she's driving and he's looking up at the stars—that’s when he goes strange and distant.

Well, no, he's pretty much strange 24/7. It's just usually a more upbeat version of strange.

And she wonders what’s going through his head when he’s walking, with the tip of his nose turning red and the wind blowing right through his awful choice of impractical coats. But she doesn’t ask, because she knows that even on the off chance he gives her an honest answer, she still couldn’t begin to understand what he was thinking.

She hadn’t seen much of the fairy magic, except when it was happening right in her arms, and then it had been terrifying. And wonderful. But mostly terrifying. So when she tries to imagine the world he’d left behind, all that she can think of is an image of Tam Lin himself, the way he’d been when he’d first appeared before her: a too-bright smile in the back of an abandoned lot.

And the way he’d howled as she held him down, and the way their queen had howled right along with him.

And that long, strange procession of creatures he called family, and how he would have just rolled over and let them kill him if she hadn’t taken him away—away from them, away from his whole terrifying, wonderful, terrifying world.

So she doesn’t pretend to be able to understand what he's thinking on those nights when he goes someplace else inside his head, or what he's seeing when he looks up at the stars, or why being cold doesn’t bother him, or how the GPS is like a talking bird.

But what she does know is that every one of those long nights will always end with him crawling back into her bed—their bed—and curling up around her, with that late-night winter chill still clinging to his skin. And she wakes up just enough to shove him away, and she tucks the blankets tighter around them both, until he warms up enough to hold again.


End file.
